How can the time you send your email make a difference in readership? What free websites will inform you if your prose is unreadable?

A new free guidefrom Ragan Communications and PoliteMail answers these questions—and offers other best practices for boosting internal email open rates, readership and outcomes.

“10 ways to get employees to open and read your email ” will help communicators reduce tear-your-hair-out frustration of seeing important messages go unread. You may even stop running into employees who say, “I never heard about that,” the day after you sent an email on the topic.

The three-page guide provides quick tips for internal communicators on areas such as better using the “from address” and intelligent use of images. Many of the tips are equally relevant for external emails.

Email is convenient because you can fire it off whenever you want, the guide states. What’s convenient for you, though, might not be for your employees. Various employees are active on email at different times of the day or week.

At Deloitte, which has 60,000 employees worldwide, communicators measure what gets opened and read on those days.

“We try to avoid Fridays,” says Ashley M. Smith, senior manager for strategy, brand and innovation. “Those are generally travel days, and we don’t see the kind of returns that we would ordinarily like to optimize.”

Teasing the news

Too many internal emails have uninformative subject lines such as “This week’s newsletter.” Find out what kind of subject line can increase by 10 percent the number of people who open and spend more than three seconds with the email.

Discover why banners might be hindering your internal email performance. “If you are using the ‘from’ address and subject line effectively, your recipients should already have all the context they need,” says Michael DesRochers, managing director of PoliteMail Software.

Those images you work so hard on might not even be seen by viewers. They can also “block how email marketing programs track the open rate and the amount of time spent reading the message,” says Kevin Kolus, senior communications manager at Cleveland Clinic.

Find out why measurement matters, and how you can learn from segmenting your audience.

“Are people really reading these emails? Are they reading them as frequently as we’d hoped?'” Kolus says.